Awesome Blood-letting In Vietnam War

Press, Volume CVIII, Issue 31724, 6 July 1968, Page 18

Awesome Blood-letting In Vietnam War

(N.Z. Press Assn. —Copyright) SAIGON, July 1. Vast allied firepower is chewing up North Vietnamese troops by the thousand in battles that began with the “Tet” offensive five months ago. The bloodletting is awesome, more than double that of last year, writes Peter Arnett, of the Associated Press. Yet to the consternation of senior United States officers, as rapidly as the Communistled troops die, as many again beat their way down through the bomb-blackened jungles, across the shell-pocked paddyfields, and right up to the doors of Saigon itself. “By God, there are 51 enemy battalions manoeuvring just one day’s march from Saigon,” said a United States general, stabbing his finger at a tactical map covered with brown patches, showing where enemy units encircled the city. “They arrived in February, they have hit us twice, and they are still there pressuring the city, regardless of casualties,” he said. Pulitzer Prize

Arnett, a Pulitzer Prize winner, who has covered the war in Vietnam for several years, travelled recently up and down the country, from the Mekong Delta to the Demilitarised Zone, collecting the information for this assessment. He says: Vietnam’s Communist leadership continues relentlessly to unroll its biggest military offensive right into the jaws of allied strength. Much of the killing in recent months the enemy has brought upon himself. He attacked objectives he had no real possibility of seizing. Many times he fought seemingly only for the sake of fighting. The easy, extensive kills have led some observer? to believe that North Vietnam’s military chief, General Vo Nguyen Giap, is making his great mistake of the war. By disregarding his own rules of guerrilla warfare, and engaging the Allies in conventional battles, these observers suggest he has committed his armies to certain defeat in South Vietnam.

The most knowledgeable Americans and Vietnamese read the current situation much differently. They do not see North Vietnam as on a “do or die” course that will lead either to victory or destruction.

They see the enemy fighting a short-term, high-inten-sity war to impact with maximum effectiveness on the South Vietnamese and the American public this year—particularly by inflicting American casualties. These have doubled to more than 9000 dead for the first six months.

Enemy forces have shelved the low-intensity, protracted war-into-the future they were fighting up to late last year. They try to reap quick political gains now, hoping that the South Vietnamese Government will fragment, that the people will get tired, and that the issue of peace on their terms can be forced in Vietnam and the United States. Many Options

Should these gains not be made, then the North Vietnamese could use any of many options they still retain. Based on Allied studies of North Vietnam’s population growth, they can sustain the current huge casualty rate indefinitely, and fight on—admittedly with troops of increasingly poorer quality. Or if the Allied pressure became too great, they could make “one little concession in Paris and we'll have to back off,” said a United States general. Alternatively, the North Vietnamese could cut their losses and fade back into jungle sancturies, continuing the war as before, while building back the guerrilla units that have been badly mauled. They could start a new offensive any time they were ready. There are two factors short of full-scale unlimited war that could frustrate the North Vietnamese. One would be a miraculous improvement in the Vietnamese Army, permitting United States troops to go home. The other is getting the Saigon Government the support of the population. Both prospects are remote. Knowledgeable Americans see the Vietnamese Army, for all its new automatic weapons, becoming at best the cutting edge for the other allies, a role hitherto held by the Americans. This would lower United States casualties, but not permit ?ny combat units to go home, these Americans believe.

There is no sign that the Vietnamese population has warmed toward a Saigon Government that is staggering through one crisis after another, anxiously nursed by the American Embassy. “The people just do not accept their Government,” one senior American said. “What a pity this is, because we can never capitalise on the other side’s mistakes.” Dissension within the Vietnamese military high command adds to political instability. “I could launch a coup d’etat any time I liked, any time I wanted to, and the Americans couldn’t stop me,” Vice-President Nguyen Cao Ky told me a few days ago. Ky was lolling In swimming trunks under a yellow parachute canopy shielding the sun on a Nha Trang beach. He had just vented rage against President Nguyen Van Thieu, long a rival, who is now attempting to grasp complete political and military power at the expense of Ky and his associates.

“President Ngo Dinh Diem craved too much power. Look what happened to him,” Ky said blinking under his blue baseball cap. Allied Strategy

After he took over the American troop command in Vietnam recently, General Creighton Abrams told a staff conference how he would handle the enemy menace on Saigon: “We are going to drop so many Bs2’s on them that all we'll need to do is send in an unarmed lurp (long-range patrol) team with notebooks to keep the score. . . .”

Firepower remains the key to Allied strategy, and the high-flying 852 bombers General Abrams favours are pounding the countryside from the heavily-populated Mekong Delta to the starklygaunt Demilitarised Zone. The Allies are fighting a holding action. When I asked the Former Vietnamese commander in the Delta, Lieutenant - General Nguyen Due Thang, if he would get victory, he said: “We hold on tight now, win later.” That pretty well sums up Allied strategy. The main enemy pressure is directed against Saigon. Allied forces are in continuous contact with 51 enemy battalions hidden within a 25mile arc of the city. Continuous helicopter operations are launched along the canals, the sugarcane fields, and swamps where the enemy soldiers are deployed. But so far they have not been pushed out.

Ten United States infantry battalions operate at a rifle shot’s distance from the Saigon perimeter, but a senior United States commander said that, even with constant surveillance, as much as 20 per cent of an attacking force could penetrate the city, particularly if a big push came from some unexpected part of the circle around Saigon. A major enemy challenge remains at the Demilitarised Zone. United States commanders have sought to relieve pressure by pulling out of the combat base of Khe Sanh, which was under North Vietnamese artillary fire for weeks at a time.

Much work is going into the only portion of the McNamara Line ever built along the zone, that section stretching across the eastern coastal plain. Sandbagged bunkers and Installations dot the region. The bomb scarred hills of the zone itself rise as a gaunt backdrop. United States forces are in constant movement, trying to checkmate the six North Vietnamese divisions rumoured to be in the region and along its borders. United States forces are also bunched in Kontum Province on the Laos-Cambodian-Vietnamese border where six enemy regiments are deployed. But United States officers feel that enemy forces do not intend fighting there for the time being—and remain visible just to tie the Americans down. Enemy Strategy The enemy of 1967 did not attack until he was reasonably sure of victory and had outnumbered his opponents, made methodical reconnaissance forays beforehand, and practised on sand tables for weeks before. These days, the North Vietnamese troops get lost, blunder blindly into Allied units, and seem to lack the guerrilla’s ability to disperse when hit by a superior force. “They are much easier to deal with than the old Viet Cong,” a United States officer said, “When they start to run like the Viet Cong, it is a disaster for them —as it would be for us. They could never get together again. So often they stick together as we go in, and they die together.” General Abrams seems to favour increasing mobile operations, and a more fluid approach to tactics than bis predecessor. It is unlikely he can do anything, however, about cutting down United States casualties, which in six months this year have reached a figure virtually equal to the total for all last year. Each United States regiment is locked on to an enemy one. and it is up to the enemy to fight or run away. This year he is generally fighting. There are reasons for confusion. Apparently the local infrastructure within each hamlet has been soaked up in the fighting, and the new units coming into battle lack guides and scouts. The enemy soldier’s leadership apparently keeps pushing him into battles he knows he can’t win. This factor led several high-ranking officers to defect recently.

“The same thing is happening to the Viet Cong and the

North Vietnamese now as happened to the South Vietnamese forces in 1963-65,” a United States officer said. “Our Vietnamese were bled white by the war. Now theirs are being bled.” The North Vietnamese also set patterns like those the Americans have long been accused of setting—using the same supply routes, and operating out of highly visible bases.

“When he moves on Saigon, we know pretty well his routes bf entry, where he will sleep, where his hospitals are. He has set patterns like us,” a United States intelligence officer said. Prisoner interrogations indicate that high - ranking enemy commanders are staying back from the fighting, a departure from the early ‘Tet” offensive. Allied officers see this as particularly disadvantageous to the enemy, because of the many decisions needed.

United States intelligence has estimated that the Communist intrastructure is being destroyed at three times last year’s rate, but thousands of these clandestine political operatives remain. By one estimate, 30,000 infrastructure members are still operating in the Second Corps area.

The Communist leadership is pouring troop replacements down the Ho Chi Minh trail. An estimated 25,000 troops were infiltrated into the Third Corps area in the first five months of this year, compared with 14,000 in all 1967. By estimate, 40.000 enemy have been killed in the Third Corps, but as in all other areas of the country the infiltrators and local recruiting

are refilling decimated ranks. “Don’t forget that there are regiments fighting today that we have written off half a dozen times in the past,” an operations officer commented in Nha Trang. “We have not been able to knock any enemy outfit out of the order of battle.” Pacification

The fury of the offensive seems to have stunned much of the population amidst whom many battles were fought. A recent study made by the United States High Command on a village southwest of Saigon indicates that the population is more passive than ever to the war. While people are generally reluctant to assist the Viet Cong willingly, they will not tell the Government if the enemy is in a village—for fear that Allied firepower will destroy their homes. ‘This sort of amounts to a plus for us,” a senior United States officer said. “The lack of help for the Viet Cong is about all we can expect, considering the petty thievery and corruption inflicted upon the population by low-

level Government officials.” High-ranking Americans in Saigon say the countryside is still not back to where it was. There has been, however, a simplification of the complicated pacification programme. Cadres now concentrate on achieving fewer things, such as security and developing the local militia. In some areas, both sides have departed, such as the Bu Dop and Loc Ninh areas of the Cambodian border, which had heavy fighting last November. “Around Saigon. the enemy’s battalions apparently stay pretty much to themselves, moving into hamlets some nights but generally leaving the population alone. He could take over the countryside, but he hasn’t bothered. He has a more important target—Saigon,” a Pacification Officer said. If the upsurge of war continues to flood across the countryside, the whole pacification programme may become redundant In the first Corps, the thriving and heav-ily-populated north-east coast became a wasteland after the North Vietnamese moved in and the Allies used heavy firepower to try to push them out.

Districts such as Hoc Mon and Lai Thieu, both within a few miles of Saigon, heavily populated and densely farmed, where once regarded as completely pacified. Now they are targets of 852 bombers—which sometimes become the first step in the complete devastation of an area. Saigon could become a city surrounded by the blackened remains of homes and farmlands if the Communist battalions refuse to budge from the vicinity. Politics Resentment over President Thieu's open bid for complete power has led six important Vietnamese generals to resign. The President is taking his time deciding whether to accept them, conscious that a wrong decision could upset the delicate balance of the country’s real power in the military high command. Vice-President Ky told me: ‘The President has enough power, hasn’t he? He is the boss because of his rank. Must he have it all, though?” Ky insisted that the President must resolve the crisis himself, presumably by fir-

ing some of his friends, from the formerly powerful Can Lao Party, whom he has placed in power. Some Americans see both Ky and Thieu as attempting to force senior generals to join one side or the other in the struggle for behind-the-scenes power.

A catalyst for an attempted coup d’etat could come from Paris where any hint of United States concessions sends rage through the Vietnamese hawks.

A compromise of any sort with the Communists would mean the destruction of free Vietnam, Ky says. Any sort of accommodation would mean handing over the country to the Communists.

Asked his reaction if the United States did make a concession in Paris, Ky said “The United States cannot force a compromise of any sort on us. I and my friends are patriots. We will fight to the end. It is better to die a patriot now than die the slow death later under the Communists.”

Ky’s views are shared bv many In the United States high command. LieutenantGeneral William Peers, commander of Field Force I. which covers the second corps area, told me: “I would hate to think that what we have done over here has been in vain. I have seen my boys die up in those hills. I would not want that to be wasted.”

High-ranking United States officials acknowledge there is obviously an underlying feeling of apprehension among some Vietnamese over the Paris talks and the possibility that the United States commitment might somehow alter its form—if the war is ever to end.